Amanda Shaw

Picture a Franciscan praying, and the Poverello of Assisi comes to mind: a coarse-robed friar, alone in the woods, arms outstretched to heaven. Picture a Benedictine or Carthusian, and Into Great Silence resonates: a tonsured monk, reciting psalms in a darkened choir stall. Picture a Jesuit, a . . . . Continue Reading »

You never know what treasures you’re going to find in the First Things archives. In this case, it was a symposium on “The Ethics of Everyday Life” from the ancient days of 1995. The stakes were not as high nor the tensions as great as for other FT symposiums , but still the . . . . Continue Reading »

In the most recent issue of FT, Mary Eberstadt candidly traces the cultural consequences of the birth-control mentality, foreseen and forewarned by Paul VI. Writing for the Catholic News Agency, James Francis Cardinal Stafford illuminates a different dimension of the forty-year-old story: the . . . . Continue Reading »

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, rightly called “one of the great souls of the age,” passed away last night in Moscow. Best known for his piercing depictions of Soviet labor camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and the three-volume Gulag Archipelago (1973–1978), . . . . Continue Reading »

Andrey Rublev, an early fifteenth-century monk in Moscow, is considered by many to be the best Russian icon painter . His work was recently pointed out to me by a young Hungarian woman, who has spent a good bit of time in Russia. Kati writes: “I cannot tell how and why, but somehow it is . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s not just the American mainline that is running dry ; over at EPPC, George Weigel notes the latest divorce for Henry VIII’s ecclesial progeny: “England’s cause, and Anglicanism’s, are no longer thought to be the same.” Unfortunately, this arguable de facto . . . . Continue Reading »

Joy isn’t the first word that comes to mind when most people think of cloistered nuns. For that matter, most people don’t think of cloistered nuns at all, or when they do cobwebby, claustrophobic choir stalls and deafening silence and penitential potatoes form their image of the strange . . . . Continue Reading »

I used to enjoy reading the journal of the Association of Women in Mathematics. Then Lawrence Summers happened. The valiant female mathematicians weren’t really discouraged, but they were angry. Angry and vocal, filling the editorials of the next couple years’ worth of issues with their . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of the oddities and abominations of the English translation of the liturgy are about to go extinct , reported the Congregation for Divine Worship last week. Of course, Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Congregation, didn’t relay the Vatican’s formal approval in precisely . . . . Continue Reading »

Literary criticism may be near extinction, to judge from the comments of some scholars in the field, not to mention the dregs of refuse called “papers,” collected every year at such major conferences as Kalamazoo or MLA. We’re desperate,” says Jonathon Gottschall , . . . . Continue Reading »